Excelsior (18 page)

“Seventy point three days elapsed for us since we entered the tanks while approximately four hundred and twenty days elapsed on Earth.”

The bridge grew quiet. Everyone had been expecting that, but somehow it was only really hitting them now. Their loved ones back on Earth had already been waiting more than a year for them to return. Alexander wondered if Caty had moved on already.

“Good work, Davorian. Send that data to Hayes so that he can attach it to our message home. They can check your math on their end once the message arrives.”

“Yes, sir. We’re at ETA one minute from arrival.”

“Better hurry up and send that message then. Hayes—did we receive anything from Earth while we were in the tanks?”

“A few pings went back and forth, but nothing more substantial than that.”

“Guess the President was serious about comm silence. Well, at least we know someone’s still alive and checking on us.” Alexander winced as he said that. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to remind everyone about the war that had broken out just before they left.

“Message sent,” Hayes reported.

“Good. Get ready to send a second one. Another snapshot from sensors. Coordinate with Vasquez to send it at the exact instant that we emerge from the wormhole.”

“Yes, sir.”

“ETA thirty seconds!” Davorian called out.

The countdown appeared at the top of the main viewscreen, and Alexander watched stars and space ripple around them as they approached the end of the wormhole. It looked as if they were trapped inside a glass bottle looking out. The countdown reached 10 seconds and a generic computerized voice began echoing through the bridge.

“Ten, nine, eight… three, two, one.”

A dazzling flash of light blinded Alexander and he called out, “Punch it, Hayes!” Bright spots danced before his eyes in a sea of darkness. He was blind!

Then came a more rational thought—no matter how bright that burst of light had been, it couldn’t have flash blinded him. There were no physical viewports on the bridge, and holoscreens couldn’t generate enough lumens to blind him.

Alexander looked around. All the crew stations were dark. He felt weightless, so the engines were offline, too. But most troubling of all was the ringing silence. Even life support was offline.

The Lincoln was completely dead in space.

Chapter 15

The crew exclaimed about the situation in a confusing babble of voices. A light snapped on, and the perfect darkness peeled back to reveal a world of shadows that shifted and danced as that light swept around the room. More lights joined that one, and dimly-lit faces appeared. Helmet lamps. Alexander yelled to be heard above the rising tumult. “Quiet!” A brief moment of silence followed, and he continued, “McAdams, what the hell just happened?”

“I don’t know, sir. Everything is offline, so I can’t exactly run a system diagnostic to find out.”

“Then give me your best guess.”

Davorian answered first. “That flash of light we saw could have been caused by some kind of arcing. Positively charged particles and negatively charged ones coming into contact with each other. The outer hull must have built up either a strong positive or negative charge while we were traveling through the wormhole, and when we emerged we came into contact with a cloud of oppositely charged particles.”

“You mean like the ionized hydrogen in a nebula?” Alexander asked, remembering the reddish strands he’d seen between the stars in Wonderland’s galaxy. “Wait a minute—are you saying we just got hit by space lighting?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Vasquez said.

“You have a better theory?” Davorian replied.

“Hold on,” Alexander said. “Why doesn’t it make sense, Vasquez?”

“Because the gas particles inside a nebula are too spread out to cause lighting. They need to be in close contact, brushing up against each other, exchanging electrons.”

“So what if this nebula is dense enough to cause that?” Davorian asked.

“A dense nebular cloud in the middle of a star system?”

“Why not?”

“Because any free-floating clouds of gas would gravitate toward the system’s sun and nearby planets, not collapse in on themselves.”

“Not if the wormhole has a stronger gravitational pull,” Davorian insisted.

“What kind of data do we have from the previous probe missions?” Korbin asked.

“A few unlovely tunnel-vision snapshots like the one we took and sent back home just before we emerged from the wormhole,” Vasquez replied.

That set off alarm bells in Alexander’s head. “Wait a minute—you mean we don’t have any real sensor data from the Wonderland side of the wormhole?”

“I thought you knew that, sir?”

Alexander recalled his briefing with Admiral Flores. She’d said the probes all stopped transmitting soon after they arrived, not before. Alexander smacked his palms into the armrests of his acceleration couch. “Damn it!”

“What’s wrong?” Korbin asked.

“They tricked us! They sent us out here without even knowing whether we actually could make it through the wormhole alive! They knew that all the probe missions failed before arrival, and they sent us anyway. They didn’t even give us the dignity of the truth! This whole mission was one big fat shot in the dark! Literally!” Silence rang like a bell in the wake of Alexander’s rant, leaving him with nothing to listen to but his pounding heart.

“Actually, they did tell me the truth,” McAdams said.

“They what? Did everyone here get a different briefing?”

McAdams went on, “Maybe they told me because I’m the only one who can do something about it. Our redundant systems were all upgraded to provide extra protection against electrical surges. The mission planners knew what they were up against, but for some reason, they didn’t think to tell everyone.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this until now.”

“I didn’t think it was important until now, sir. And I didn’t realize that no one else knew. Sorry, sir.”

Alexander grunted. “Well that still doesn’t explain why we’re all still sitting here in the dark. The backups should have come online by now.”

“Automatic switch-over was disabled to prevent residual charges from frying the backup systems, too. I should be able to get things back up and running again. All I need to do is get to the engine room and switch over to the redundant systems manually.”

Alexander turned on his helmet lamps and unbuckled his harness. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Davorian—”

“I have the conn?”

“You’re a mind reader. Korbin, you’re with me and McAdams.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander pushed out of his chair and went floating back toward the elevators. With power out all over the ship, the elevators weren’t working, but that’s what the access ladders in the shafts were for. Alexander mentally activated the microjets in his pressure suit and fired a few bursts from his palms to keep himself on course. He reached the elevator doors and grabbed one of guide rails to keep from bouncing away.

Korbin and McAdams reached the guide rail on the other side of the doors and waited while he opened an access panel to expose the doors’ manual crank. He turned the crank with one hand while he held onto the rail with his other. Once the doors were open wide enough for them to climb through, they piled in and McAdams opened the access hatch in the floor, exposing the fathomless depths of the shaft below them. As they climbed down through the access hatch, Alexander’s mind turned to the problem at hand—what had disabled the Lincoln in the first place?

Space lightning? Alexander didn’t buy it. Vasquez was right; it would take a very dense nebula to cause that. Something on the order of a planetary atmosphere. But what else might have happened?

Alien interference? He recalled Admiral Flores telling him that the wormhole probably wasn’t naturally-occurring, and Max Carter was assigned to the Lincoln in order to handle first contact if the need arose, but Alexander still didn’t give the idea of Alien involvement much credence. If there were aliens guarding the exit of the wormhole, then why had they never traveled through to visit Earth?

But reassuring as that logic was, his certainty eroded steadily as they crawled down the elevator shaft. Their head lamps cast deep shadows in every doorway on every level, and Alexander’s heart pounded, his mind conjuring alien monsters to fill in the blank spaces.

Suddenly all of those shadows vanished. Lights snapped on inside the elevator shaft, and the ship lurched back into motion, accelerating at a full 9.8 m/s2. The ladder rungs ripped free of Alexander’s hands and he fell head first toward the bottom of the elevator shaft. McAdams and Korbin went tumbling down ahead of him, both screaming. The acceleration stopped just as suddenly as it began, but the damage was already done. The bottom of the elevator shaft came rushing toward them at more than 10 meters per second.

Smack!

All the shadows came rushing back.

Chapter 16

Alexander woke up lying in the ship’s infirmary. A nurse came in, followed by Doctor Crespin. The nurse checked his vital signs, and Doctor Crespin came to stand beside his bed.

“How are you feeling, Captain?”

Alexander struggled to remember what had happened to bring him to the infirmary. Then he recalled hitting the bottom of the elevator shaft, and he winced. So that’s what it’s like to run into a brick wall…

“I’m okay, I think.”

“You took a nasty fall.”

Alexander frowned and tried to sit up, but Crespin placed a hand on his chest to stop him. “Easy. Let me help.” He reached out and adjusted something below the cot, and the top half of it began to rise, lifting him into a sitting position.

“How’s that?” Crespin asked.

“Fine. How long was I out? And where are McAdams and Korbin?”

“We’re still monitoring them, but there were no serious injuries. And to answer your question, you’ve been unconscious for about an hour.”

“That sounds like a pretty bad concussion to me.”

“We’re going to keep you here under observation while we make the approach to Wonderland.”

“We’re on approach already? What did I miss? And how the hell did this happen? There are fail-safes to prevent the engines from coming online suddenly after a power failure.”

“Easy, Captain. From what I understand, the power surge fried the safeties.”

“But not the engines? Great. I’ll have to congratulate the engineers who built this ship when we get back to Earth. They built more surge protection into the engines than they did into the emergency cut-outs that might stop them from turning us all into pancakes.”

“Bad luck, Captain. Fortunately, Davorian was able to kill thrust manually.”

“What about the wormhole? Did it collapse? And did we confirm the source of the power surge?”

“I don’t know, but you should be resting. I can check into all of that for you.”

“No, where’s my comm band? If you need to keep me here, at least let me stay in touch with my crew.”

Crespin hesitated, but then he nodded and ordered the nurse to bring Alexander his personal belongings. A moment later the nurse returned and passed a bundle of clothes to the doctor. Crespin found the comm band and handed it to him. Alexander put it on and made a call to Davorian.

“It’s good to hear from you, Sir.”

“Report, Lieutenant.”

“We are three days out from Wonderland at a steady one G of acceleration. Repair crews are busy getting all of our systems back online, but the critical ones came back all by themselves.”

“What caused the power surge?”

“Well, it wasn’t lightning. We ran into a belt of intense radiation around the exit of the wormhole. The crew is calling it the David Davorian Belt. If we’d known the belt existed we could have shut down the ship’s systems ahead of time and cruised safely through.”

“We’ll keep that in mind for next time. What about the wormhole? Did it collapse?”

“Not yet, sir.”

Alexander blinked. “We’d better send Earth an update before it does.”

“I don’t think the wormhole is going to collapse, sir.”

“Really?” Alexander tried not to get his hopes up. “What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, we were able to see straight through to the galaxy on this end while we were still inside the wormhole. That means it was already open; we didn’t have to force it open. The radiation belt explains the failed probe missions. I’m not sure how scientists came up with the collapsing gateway theory that you mentioned in your mission brief, but I think we’ve effectively disproved it.”

“So we don’t need anyone to rescue us.”

“No, sir.”

“That’s really good news, Lieutenant. I hope you’re right.”

“So do I, sir.”

“Has Hayes sent a mission update back through the wormhole?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s he waiting for?”